Composer and lyricist, Jay Livingston was born in McDonald, Pennsylvania on March 28, 1915. As a child, he studied piano with Harry Archer in Pittsburgh and later, while attending the University of Pennsylvania, he studied composition and orchestration with Harl McDonald. While still a student at Penn, he organized a dance band that played for various Penn functions and eventually played in local nightclubs and cruise ships. He met a fellow student who joined the band, Ray Evans, and the two began a lifelong collaboration that would become one of the legendary songwriting partnerships in the history of American popular music.

After their graduation from Penn in 1937, they moved to New York City to work on Tin Pan Alley. Writing special material for the Broadway stars, Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, Evans and Livingston had their first hit song Gbye Now. They also worked on songs that were included in the Olsen and Johnson show Sons O Run.

Livingston joined the US Army during World War II and upon his return, he and Evans moved to Hollywood in 1945 under contract with Paramount Pictures, where they stayed for the next ten years. Their first film in 1946 for the Olivia DeHaviland vehicle To Each His Own, was a #1 hit in that year and earned the team their first Academy Award nomination.

After 1955, the team free-lanced for different Hollywood studios, contribution individual songs and complete scores.

Returning to New York in 1958, Livingston and Evans produced their first Broadway score, Oh Captain, a stage adaptation of the film The Captains Paradise. They had stage…